weeknotes: Harrogate, baby!

Jul 18, 2025

Eyup.

It's Friday! Well, it's Thursday when I'm writing this, but it'll be Friday when it gets published. Though there's no guarantee that you'll actually read this on Friday, I guess.

Time is weird, yo.

I'm Dave Graham, astonishingly lapsed book tempter on all the socials as @dakegra. I'm still easily distractible with a hot beverage and cake, a cat, or a shiny new book. My TBR pile hates me. It's started looming menacingly in the corner.

The reason I'm writing this on Thursday instead of my usual last minute Friday panic is that this weekend is the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. And I'm going to be there on Friday (and probably Saturday), catching up with lovely bookish folk, authors, bloggers, publicists, the works.

Last year I made myself a t-shirt, which got a lot of nice comments as well as making me very easy to spot across a crowded beer tent.

Yours truly with the lovely Louise Beech repping her new book Lights Out, and the equally lovely Chris Scotland

A couple of friends were bemoaning the fact that whilst authors etc got a lanyard with a name badge, no-one else did. And I'm terrible with names.

So with a bit of fiddling around with some design software and a laminator, I made my own name badge. Gotta rep the blog.

This also makes things easier for me not having to try and spell my socials ID or blog name. Is it a bit 'ooh look at me'? Well, yeah. But some authors have their name on t-shirts or tote bags (publishing runs on tote bags as currency). We'll see how it goes! I shall report back.

Must take more selfies this year.

If you're feeling keen, you can see what I got up to last year, or back in 2023 at my first visit.

Reading

After a bit of a bookish slump in reading mojo, I picked up Jo Callaghan's Human Remains, the third book in her series featuring an AI hologram detective.

Fabulous stuff - I was up until 1am finishing it. Huge fan of these books, and highly recommend them - start with book 1, obvs.

Watching

More Tour de France, which I find absolutely gripping, though others complain that it's just a bunch of skinny dudes on very very expensive bikes having a jolly around France for 3 weeks. I mean, they're not wrong.

Also finally got around to watching Wicked earlier this week. I've listened to the soundtrack so many times but never seen the musical, so was really looking forward to it. It did not disappoint. Gloriously colourful, fabulous tunes and am now very much looking forward to part 2.

Photos

Took advantage of the nice weather last weekend and snuck in a trip over to the beach at Fraisthorpe with Amber and the fam. She had such a good time, we think it was her first real beach trip, and she had a go at swimming and barking at other dogs and generally being an excellent beach dog.